TIFF is still very much alive, and very much in use- Ask anyone who deals with fax software.
and yeah, TGA files are still found lurking about for 3d programs. I seem to recall that second life wanted tga files for textures back in 04-05 when I was dinking around with it more heavily.
No PBM? A format for images you can edit in a text editor? What’s not to love?
P1
7 5
0 1 0 0 0 1 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 1 1 1 0 0
0 1 0 0 0 1 0
1 0 0 0 0 0 1Tiff is a container for various kinds of image file formats, only a few of which are used by Faxes. Conversely, if I want a lossless copy of a photo (because JPEG is awful for certain types of images containing high contrast elements such as text), I can also save it in TIFF.
I’ll take your TIFF and raise you a PICT, which is still near and dear to my heart.
How I solved these problems ‘back in the day’ -
Still going strong 30 years later -
https://www.lemkesoft.de/en/
It still does. I think the format’s popularity in 3D software is its overall flexibility and broad feature support (like 8-bit alpha transparency, which makes it useful for channel-packing*). PNG has similar capabilities, but TGA has been around longer and I’m guessing has more optimized loading pipelines. Assuming the source files aren’t being converted into a DXT5 or DXT11 compressed format internally, which is what Unity does to basically all of the image formats it supports (and it supports a lot of them).
*Not to get off-topic too far, but channel-packing is the art of cramming up to 4 8-bit monochrome image maps (like transparency, ambient occlusion, roughness, etc.) into a single 24- or 32-bit image to save on video memory. The R, G, B, and A channels are each loaded into a different “slot” in a material, meaning you only need one pointer to one image, instead of four images of the same resolution. It can make for some really funky-looking images, but as long as the engine knows what to do with each color channel, it doesn’t really matter.
Early graphics systems liked their files to be laid out in specific ways–interleaving patterns and so on. Some graphics formats make this easier than others.
Ideally, you wanted a binary dump of what the graphics card wants, with no fancy preprocessing required.
I think TARGA supported up to 16 bits per channel. which seems absurd at the time. Maybe it makes dealing with scanners that much easier.
Unreal says it PREFERS textures are loaded in .tga format (8, 16, or 24bit please)
Yeah, I was surprised when I came across textures in .tga as I learn all these game dev tools… I was like “What year is it?!” but I gather tga has properties that are useful for game shit like this.
Calling BMP dead seems like calling RS-232 dead; sure, it’s widely deprecated in contexts where complexity is an acceptable trade for power; but there are a lot of contexts where power complexity is either temporarily or permanently unaffordable; so something simple is fine, or even preferred.
(also like RS-232, this retreat toward a niche has led to, on average, a narrowing of what “.bmp” is actually likely to mean. With more powerful and flexible formats available, you are less likely to wander into OS/2 related compression methods, stuff only supported on winCE 5; or the bits aimed at bitmaps that are to be embedded as Windows Metafile records(unless you are specifically interacting with Windows software that uses EMF; not just looking for a format that an embedded device can dump from flash to framebuffer with very limited chewing)
I use two of these every day. Five color printing works really well with .bmp. .Tiff is just really well behaved in tasks that hop across a variety of systems.
You can also save a TIFF with JPEG compression, to get the worst of both worlds.
There there, somewhere SGI stuff lives on as an Imagination engineering edition phone with like 5 pounds of fancy metal shielding on the chips. I haven’t even grabbed the VR XPlane for phone uses yet. Or joined the Ocu-chan Army.
Yeah, .ecc isn’t even in there. They really explored broccoli rabe, consensual space edition.
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